Internet service operators such as e-commerce, media outlets, information providers, etc., benefit from knowing the geographic location of their users. Geographic location (“geolocation”) information may be used to provide location specific content, to perform network load balancing, or to provide demographic information.
Location specific content may include providing local weather information, localizing content by providing language- and/or country-specific interfaces, providing selective access based on location, etc. Geolocation may assist in network load balancing by routing data traffic to servers geographically closer to the users. Demographic information of user locations may be used for marketing and planning purposes.
Existing geolocation services suffer from errors, maintenance, performance, and reliability problems, particularly in regions with rapidly growing networks. In regions with rapidly growing networks, given the distributed and highly variable nature of the internet, delay-based geolocation methods using triangulation are inaccurate. Delay-based systems rely on an assumption that a linear correlation exists between networking delay and the distance between a client and a landmark. These delays are then used to triangulate the approximate position of the client. A client may be any user, server, or other network device which is connected to a network. A landmark is any network device with a known geolocation which is used as a reference point.
In richly-connected internet regions (RCIRs), for example North America and Western Europe, the assumption of a high correlation between delay and distance may provide useful data for triangulation methods. However, in moderately-connected internet regions (MCIRs), for example developing nations, this assumption breaks down and the correlation is no longer valid. Factors contributing to this include network congestion, circuitous paths, moderate inter-autonomous system (AS) connections, etc. Thus, in MCIRs, the delay between a client and a landmark does not sufficiently correlate with the physical distance between the client and landmark to enable usably accurate triangulation based geolocation.